Thursday, January 21, 2010

The Happy Room

All cartoonists should have a happy room filled with toys and cartoon art and comic books.All this fun will be naturally absorbed by you and will fill your ow cartons with joy and wackiness.I urged Kali to take some pictures of hers to share with the world, 'cause it is just so Goddamned happy looking.Go see for yourself!http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2010/01/newfangled-icon-links-and-ultramodern.htmlWhat a load of fun!

An I-kid-you-not box of "BARF" brand Derergent (!!!!????) with some kind of Arabic lettering on the back (Oh, those foreign companies sure know how to look after their multilingual marketing departments, don't they?).

A completely surreal but apparently authentic picture of my Granny (not the one mentioned below *R.I.P.*) gleefully feeding a baby pig from a bottle in a restaurant while the rest of my sharply-dressed family of two generations ago look on with "Oh my, how gay!" faces.

The obligatory lava lamp.

And then there's this awesome old toy from my Baka (Croatian Grandmother *also R.I.P.*) that's hard to describe briefly, but let me give it a try (John, you'd love this thing, and so would Kali and maybe Mike):

It's a small pencil sharpener....except that mounted on top of the plastic case for the shavings there's a little red donkey. Adorable - the design is kinda Disney-meets-George Pal, what with the painted-on straight eyelashes and round white spots on the cheeks, but still with a bit of a Bambi vibe. And there's this kind of second plastic case under the first one that's connected to little strings running up through the donkey's legs and then its neck via its torso. When you push down on the top case so it touches the table and covers the bottom case, the strings slacken, causing the donkey's legs, torso and head to collapse in that order. But of course, he's always still smiling. If you wanna see it I could upload a picture or two. It's an enormously sentimental thing to me.

*Oh yes, and I also have a found reprint of an old (looks 1920s-ish?) poster advertising "Bicycle Brand Fresh British Columbia Red Salmon". Of course there's a joke there - the question is whether or not the company realized it at the time....

An empty room can be a "happy room", all you need is, firstly, rip a tube (full chamber at 4'), empty a whippet (heavy duty balloon required), and play the "Perry" track from the Butthole Surfers' seminal album, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, and welcome to cartoon-land, kiddies!!